Søren Kierkegaard lived the majority of his life alone. He
left his native Copenhagen only three times—each time to visit Berlin—and never
married, though he was engaged for a short time. Despite his solitary existence,
Kierkegaard’s writings are some of the most impassioned and controversial in
all of philosophy. He is sometimes called a “poet-philosopher” in honor of both
his passion and his highly literary experiments in style and form. Kierkegaard
is known for his critiques of Hegel, for his fervent analysis of the Christian
faith, and for being an early precursor to the existentialists.Kierkegaard was born in 1813, the year Denmark went
bankrupt. Although Kierkegaard’s father had personally managed to escape
financial ruin, Denmark as a nation struggled for much of the early to
mid-1800s. The people put increasing pressure on the monarchs to institute a
democracy, and a free constitution was finally established in 1848. The changes
leading up to the governmental restructuring resulted in an explosion of wealth
and learning and afforded citizens like Kierkegaard the leisure and environment
necessary to pursue a life of writing and thinking. However, democratization
also helped inspire one of Kierkegaard’s most enduring philosophical themes:
freedom could actually lead to fear. While the new religious and social
freedoms available in Denmark brought many positive changes, they also had
psychological repercussions that deeply concerned Kierkegaard. He felt that
having the freedom to choose inevitably involved feeling anxiety over which
path to choose, even as it simultaneously inspired joy. Kierkegaard also
worried that too many people squandered that freedom by blindly following
public opinion. Kierkegaard was born into a wealthy and respected family,
the youngest of seven siblings. His mother was an unassuming figure: quiet,
plain, and not formally educated. Kierkegaard’s father, on the other hand, was
melancholic, anxious, deeply pious, and fiercely intelligent. Kierkegaard’s
father believed that a youthful denunciation of God had brought a curse upon
his family and that all his children would die before the age of thirty-four (a
fate that only Søren and his brother Peter escaped). Kierkegaard ended up inheriting
a great deal of his own intellectual and psychological character from his
father. In 1830, he enrolled at Copenhagen University and began to study
theology, per his father’s wishes. His mother died while he was at university,
and despite keeping a remarkably detailed set of journals, Kierkegaard never
mentioned her death. He didn’t take his theological studies very seriously,
though he was reading a great deal of literature and philosophy. Kierkegaard
was highly social during this period, attending dinners, concerts, and the
theater, and becoming well known for his wit and good humor. When his father
died in 1838, however, Kierkegaard settled down and devoted himself to the
study of theology.Kierkegaard received his doctoral degree in theology in 1840.
He had inherited a large sum of money from his father, and as a rich,
accomplished, young man, Kierkegaard was considered one of Copenhagen’s most
eligible bachelors. He became engaged to the beautiful Regine Olsen, the
seventeen-year-old daughter of a politician, but later broke their engagement.
Despite their deep love for one another, Kierkegaard apparently believed that
his life as a thinker made him unsuitable for marriage, particularly to a
young, inexperienced girl. Kierkegaard had strong feelings for Olsen throughout
his life, despite her having married another man and leaving Copenhagen with
him. His relationship with Olsen—like his relationship with his father—is a
major biographical influence on his philosophical work.After breaking his engagement with Olsen, Kierkegaard
retired to a solitary life of writing, publishing a prodigious amount of work
over the next several years. At first he felt that his books weren’t being
noticed outside elite literary circles, which was rendering his work politically
and socially ineffectual. To bring attention to his books, he tried to provoke
the satirical paper The Corsair to attack him in its pages. Kierkegaard
succeeded in 1945, though The Corsair focused their criticisms mainly on his
personal rather than intellectual life. Kierkegaard was lampooned in The
Corsair for years, which significantly damaged his social standing. It did,
however, spur him into a highly productive phase of writing and publishing.
Kierkegaard published his first major book, Either/Or, in 1843 and his last,
The Changelessness of God, in 1855, the year of his death. Between these two
books, Kierkegaard produced over 30 volumes of philosophy, theology, and
criticism.One of the driving forces behind Kierkegaard’s work was a
desire to refute the tenets of Hegelian philosophy. Hegel was a German
philosopher who wrote during the late 1700s and the early to mid-1800s and
whose work had come to dominate European philosophical thought. Hegel’s major
philosophical project was developing the notion of a “historical dialectic.”
Generally speaking, the dialectic is a logical, argumentative method that
philosophers like Plato and Socrates employed in their attempts to ascertain
the truth. In the dialectic, one person proposes an idea or belief. His or her
partner refutes that idea, pointing out the argument’s flaws. This allows a
new, more convincing argument to be advanced. The process continues until all
misconception has been cleared away and only the truth remains. Hegel believed
that the evolution of human societies could be explained according to the
dialectical model. According to him, societies’ ideas develop collectively.
Society begins with one notion of the world and eventually comes to refute it,
leading to a new, collectively accepted model. A culture’s ideas naturally and
inevitably progress according to this dialectical pattern. The historical
dialectic would eventually lead a culture to God, who was, according to Hegel,
the foundation of the logical structure of the universe. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, didn’t think that God could
be understood or reached through logic. God was greater than, not equivalent
to, logic. The only way to reach God, according to Kierkegaard, was through
faith—the opposite of reason—for it requires one to embrace the absurd and the
unexplainable. While Hegel spent his life trying to explain how to reach God,
Kierkegaard spent his life obscuring the path to prove to people that God was
beyond intelligence. Kierkegaard greatly admired Hegel but believed Hegel had
committed a great wrong by claiming to have genuinely reached the truth.In addition to his attacks on Hegelianism, Kierkegaard is
often noted as being the “father of existentialism,” though his work long
predates the term itself. Briefly, existentialism is the belief that the world
has no intrinsic meaning or purpose and, consequently, that individuals alone
bear the responsibility for their actions and decisions. Kierkegaard rejected
Hegel’s historical dialectic, which Kierkegaard felt was overly systematic and
deterministic. Kierkegaard—like the existentialists who followed him—stressed
that each individual must negotiate his or her own relationship with God
without any mediation from the church, the government, or other thinkers
(including himself).Kierkegaard was heavily influenced by the ancient Greek
philosophers Plato and Socrates and by the rhetorical methods they adopted to
convey their arguments. Socrates believed that the knowledge of most “experts”
and “wise men” was based on poor reasoning. To expose these misconceptions,
Socrates would pretend not to understand them, forcing these wise men to
explain and examine their own beliefs. Often, when applying this tactic,
Socrates would find that these people had simply adopted the dogma from earlier
generations without properly questioning this received wisdom. In this way,
Socrates highlighted the discrepancy between the appearance of possessing
wisdom and actually possessing it. In his texts, Plato often employed
dialogues, wherein various characters would debate all sides of an issue, often
not coming to a coherent conclusion. The purpose of Plato’s dialogues was much
the same as Socrates’ method of relentless questioning: to get readers or
listeners to consider the issue for themselves. Instead of claiming to know the answers, Plato and Socrates
sought to find the proper questions. Kierkegaard employed similar tactics in
his writing. He didn’t believe he had all the answers, but he wanted to engage
and provoke his readers so that they, in turn, would seek answers for
themselves. Kierkegaard employed satire, parody, and irony in his writing as
well as techniques that disoriented and potentially confused readers.
Kierkegaard wanted his readers to question his authority as much as anyone
else’s. Themes, Arguments, and IdeasThe Problems of Boredom, Anxiety, and DespairBoredom, anxiety, and despair are the human psyche’s major
problems, and Kierkegaard spends most of his writing diagnosing these three
ills. People are bored when they are not being stimulated, either physically or
mentally. Relief from boredom can only be fleeting. Passion, a good play, Bach,
or a stimulating conversation might provide momentary relief from boredom, but
the relief doesn’t last. Boredom is not merely a nuisance: a psychologically
healthy human must find some way to avert boredom. Conflicts between one’s
ethical duty and one’s religious duty cause anxiety. Social systems of ethics
often lead one to make choices that are detrimental to one’s spiritual health,
and vice versa. The tension between these conflicting duties causes anxiety,
and like boredom, anxiety must be escaped for a person to be happy. Finally,
despair is a result of the tension between the finite and the infinite. Humans
are frightened of dying, but they are also frightened of existing forever.
Kierkegaard believed that everyone would die but also that everyone had an
immortal self, or soul, that would go on forever. Boredom and anxiety can be
alleviated in various ways, but the only way to escape despair is to have total
faith in God. Having total faith in God, however, was more than simply
attending church regularly and behaving obediently. Faith required intense
personal commitment and a dedication to unending self-analysis. Kierkegaard
thought that having total faith in God, and thus escaping despair, was
extremely difficult as well as extremely important.The Aesthetic as the First Stage on Life’s WayKierkegaard proposed that the individual passed through
three stages on the way to becoming a true self: the aesthetic, the ethical,
and the religious. Each of these “stages on life’s way” represents competing
views on life and as such potentially conflicts with one another. Kierkegaard takes
the unusual step of having each stage of life described and represented by a
different pseudonymous character. Thus, it becomes too difficult to ascertain
which propositions Kierkegaard himself upholds. This fits with Kierkegaard’s
characteristic tendency to avoid dictating answers. He preferred that readers
reach their own conclusions.The aesthetic is the realm of sensory experience and
pleasures. The aesthetic life is defined by pleasures, and to live the
aesthetic life to the fullest one must seek to maximize those pleasures.
Increasing one’s aesthetic pleasures is one way to combat boredom, and
Kierkegaard described many methods of doing so. He proposes that the
anticipation of an event often exceeds the pleasure of the event itself, and so
he suggests ways of drawing out anticipation. One suggestion is to leave all of
your mail for three days before opening it. Unplanned events can, at times,
lead to pleasures as great as anticipation, but the pleasure of planned events
is almost entirely in the anticipation.The importance of the aesthetic is acknowledged, but it is
also presented as an immature stage. The aesthete is only concerned with his or
her personal enjoyment, and because aesthetic pleasure is so fleeting, an
aesthete has no solid framework from which to make coherent, consistent
choices. Eventually, the pleasures of the aesthetic wear thin, and one must
begin seeking the ethical pleasures instead. The ethical life actually offers
certain pleasures the aesthetic life cannot. An aesthete can never do something
solely for the good of someone else, but we all know that doing things for
others without personal motives can actually be incredibly enjoyable.The Ethical as the Second Stage on Life’s WayEthics are the social rules that govern how a person ought
to act. Ethics are not always in opposition to aesthetics, but they must take
precedence when the two conflict. The aesthetic life must be subordinated to
the ethical life, as the ethical life is based on a consistent, coherent set of
rules established for the good of society. A person can still experience
pleasure while living the ethical life. The ethical life serves the purpose of
allowing diverse people to coexist in harmony and causes individuals to act for
the good of society. The ethical person considers the effect his or her actions
will have on others and gives more weight to promoting social welfare than to
achieving personal gain. The ethical life also affords pleasures that the
aesthetic does not. Aesthetics steers one away from consistency, since
repetition can lead to boredom. An ethical person doesn’t simply enjoy things
because they’re novel but makes ethical choices because those choices evoke a
higher set of principles. Kierkegaard uses marriage as an example of an ethical
life choice. In marriage, the excitement of passion can quickly fade, leading
to boredom and a diminishing of aesthetic pleasure. However, by consistently
acting for the good of one’s spouse, one learns that there are enjoyments
beyond excitement. Still, the ethical life does little to nurture one’s
spiritual self. The ethical life diverts one from self-exploration since it
requires an individual to follow a set of socially accepted norms and
regulations. According to Kierkegaard, self-exploration is necessary for faith,
the key requirement for a properly religious life.The Religious as Third Stage on Life’s WayKierkegaard considers the religious life to be the highest
plane of existence. He also believes that almost no one lives a truly religious
life. He is concerned with how to be “a Christian in Christendom”—in other
words, how to lead an authentically religious life while surrounded by people
who are falsely religious. For Kierkegaard, the relationship with God is
exclusively personal, and he believed the large-scale religion of the church
(i.e., Christendom) distracts people from that personal relationship.
Kierkegaard passionately criticized the Christian Church for what he saw as its
interference in the personal spiritual quest each true Christian must
undertake.In the aesthetic life, one is ruled by passion. In the
ethical life, one is ruled by societal regulations. In the religious life, one
is ruled by total faith in God. One can never be truly free, and this causes
boredom, anxiety, and despair. True faith doesn’t lead to freedom, but it
relieves the psychological effects of human existence. Kierkegaard claims that
the only way to make life worthwhile is to embrace faith in God, and that faith
necessarily involves embracing the absurd. One has faith in God, but one cannot
believe in God. We believe in things that we can prove, but we can only have
faith in things that are beyond our understanding. For example, we believe in
gravity: we feel its effects constantly, which we recognize as proof of
gravity’s existence. It makes no sense, though, to say we have faith in
gravity, since that would require the possibility that, someday, gravity would
fail to materialize. Faith requires uncertainty, and thus we can have faith in
God because God is beyond logic, beyond proof, and beyond reason. There’s no
rational evidence for God, but this is exactly what allows people to have faith
in him.The Pleasures of Repetition and RecollectionRepetition and recollection are two contrasting ways of
trying to maximize enjoyment. Repetition serves multiple purposes for
Kierkegaard. First, it has an important aesthetic function. People want to
repeat particularly enjoyable experiences, but the original pleasure is often
lost in the repeating. This is due to the expectation that things will be just
the same the second time as the first time. The pleasure of expectation clouds
the fact that the original experience wasn’t undertaken with a specific idea of
the joy it would cause. Repetition can produce powerful feelings but usually
only when the experience occurs unplanned. In this case, the pleasure might
even be magnified at the sudden resurgence of happy memories—in other words,
the recollection. There is pleasure in planned repetition, but it is a
comfortable pleasure, not an exciting one. While repetition offers the joy of
anticipation—joy that seldom materializes in the actual event—recollection
offers the joy of remembering a particularly happy event. Recollection can be
cultivated along with the imagination to increase one’s day-to-day aesthetic
pleasure. Often, recalling a pleasant occurrence is more enjoyable than
repeating the same event: remembering the Christmases of your childhood is
often more pleasant than Christmas is in adulthood. Indeed, much of the
pleasure of Christmas, for an older person, can come from nostalgia. The
pleasures of recollection, which are best enjoyed alone, are well suited to the
aesthetic life. Unplanned repetition is a truly aesthetic pleasure as well,
while planned repletion, such as that represented by marriage, affords more
ethical pleasures than aesthetic ones. Either/Or SummaryKierkegaard wrote Either/Or soon after receiving his
doctorate and breaking his engagement with Regine Olsen. Either/Or is his first
major work and remains one of his most widely read. Kierkegaard wrote the book
under a series of false names, or pseudonyms. The book has two parts: the first
deals with the aesthetic, a word that Kierkegaard uses to denote personal,
sensory experiences. The second part of Either/Or deals with ethics. In this
part Kierkegaard discusses the merits of a social and morally proper life.
Kierkegaard wrote the first section under the simple pseudonym “A,” although he
wrote the last section of part I, “The Diary of the Seducer,” under the
pseudonym “Johannes Climacus.” Kierkegaard wrote part II under the
interchangeable pseudonyms “B” and “the Judge.” We know now that Kierkegaard
himself wrote the entire book, but when Either/Or was first published few
people knew the author’s actual identity. A claims that the aesthetic finds its
highest expression in music, the theatre, and love. However, the source of love
and the arts’ aesthetic power lies in their ability to inspire the imagination.
A considers the imagination to be the most useful tool in obtaining aesthetic
pleasure. B argues that living an ethical life is preferable to the aesthetic
life.Music and drama create different kinds of aesthetic
experiences. The aesthetic pleasure offered by music is the most direct. The
very best music affects the imagination immediately. The pleasures to be found
in drama—which is too concrete and intellectual to directly fire the
imagination—lie in the viewer’s opportunity to pretend to be someone else. The
pairing of music and drama can be a particularly transcendent aesthetic
experience. A praises Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an opera based on the story of the
great lover Don Juan. The music in Don Giovanni can be enjoyed on its own, and
it is equally enjoyable to pretend to be Don Juan. However, the opera teaches a
valuable aesthetic lesson as well, because Don Juan is the ultimate selfish
aesthete. Repetition dulls the pleasure of an act, so Don Juan never repeats
the act of love more than once with the same woman. Although he never sleeps with
the same woman twice, by so doing he continually repeats the act of sleeping
with a new woman. He can never enjoy the woman he is with because he is in such
a hurry to get to the next one. A is devoted to pleasure as well and sees
repetition as an enemy of pleasure. However, A believes that obtaining true
aesthetic pleasure requires a more measured approach than blindly following
one’s passions, as Don Juan does.The extreme difficulty of achieving true aesthetic pleasure
leads A to claim that boredom is the most common, and unpleasant, human state.
In fact, A goes so far as to claim that it is the root of all evil and makes a
number of proposals for how it ought to be dealt with. One such plan is for
Denmark to borrow a large sum of money and devote it explicitly to the
entertainment of the masses. There are also more personal measures one can take
to avoid boredom. A suggests that when receiving mail, one ought to leave it
unopened for three days because the pleasure of imagining what is in the envelope
far exceeds the pleasure to be gained from actually reading the letter.Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of the “The
Seducer’s Diary,” which is the most famous section of Either/Or, further
explores how to maximize aesthetic pleasure. “The Seducer’s Diary” is Johannes
Climacus’s detailed, firsthand account of his wooing a young woman named
Cordelia. For the majority of the diary, Johannes Climacus plots the seduction
very slowly and deliberately. He takes great pleasure out of planning the seduction
and doesn’t even speak to Cordelia until the last quarter of the diary. Once
Johannes Climacus makes his move, things happen very quickly, and he’s soon
engaged to Cordelia. He isn’t satisfied with the success of his seduction,
however, until he has deliberately driven Cordelia to break the engagement and
then, later, to come back to him. At this point he is finished with her and
goes to find a new woman to seduce. Once Johannes Climacus has exhausted all
the imaginative and exciting possibilities with Cordelia, continuing his
relationship with her would lead him to boredom.The second part of Either/Or, written under the pseudonyms B
and the Judge—who eventually converge into a single character—takes the form of
a letter written by the Judge to A. The letter is a response to part I of
Either/Or; in it, the Judge attempts to persuade A that the ethical life is
better than the purely aesthetic life. First, the Judge attempts to defend
marriage. The Judge claims that the ethical life of being married is better
than the aesthetic life of the seducer, and the Judge makes this claim on an
aesthetic basis. The Judge says that there is actually more aesthetic pleasure
to be found in a consistent marriage than in a bachelor life. The judge draws a
distinction between the ethical, forward-looking repetition of the married life
and the aesthetic, backward-looking recollection of the confirmed bachelor. He
further points out that romantic literature always focuses on what happens
before marriage but not what happens after, and he claims that the aesthetic
fear of repetition is actually cowardly and selfish. The Judge argues that
romantic love can exist in marriage and goes so far as to say that marriage is
the highest form of romantic love. The ethical courage to submit to repetition
is rewarded by the consistent, reliable aesthetic pleasure found in a loving
marriage.The Judge goes on to claim that A’s devotion to the
aesthetic prevents A from making any significant choices. Although A has a far
wider range of options than the Judge, the Judge argues that since the Judge’s
choices are limited by ethics—by a consideration of other people—his choices
are much weightier and mean much more to him than A’s aesthetic choices mean to
A. The aesthetic has its place, the Judge agrees, but the place of the
aesthetic is beneath the ethical. The Judge’s actual loving relationship with
his wife is far better, the Judge argues, than the largely imaginary
relationship between Johannes Climacus and Cordelia. The Judge experiences his
pleasure with another person, while a seducer’s pleasure is completely in his
or her imagination. Part II ends with a sermon that the Judge has received from
a friend. The sermon is entitled “The Edification Which Lies in the Fact that
in Relation to God we Are Always in the Wrong.” The sermon’s key point is that
humans, whether their choices are aesthetically or ethically motivated, are
never in the right. Only by accepting that God is always right, and by trying
to do God’s will, can a person escape unhappiness.AnalysisIt is tempting, but
incorrect, to read Either/Or as an explanation of how one can move from the
aesthetic life into the ethical. True, the pleasures of the aesthetic are
solipsistic, fleeting, and unreliable, while the pleasures of the ethical are
empathetic, prolonged, and constant. However, both A and the Judge make good
cases for their particular philosophies. A attempts to seduce the reader with
his prose, just as Johannes Climacus attempts to seduce Cordelia, just as Don
Juan seduces women, and just as music seduces the listener. A, through his
attempted seduction of the reader, is trying to lead the reader toward an
appreciation of the aesthetic life. Alternatively, the Judge attempts to
convince the reader that the ethical life is better than the aesthetic life,
and he uses reason, not seduction, to accomplish this. Each writer’s rhetorical
strategy appropriately reflects his values. However, a closer examination
reveals inconsistencies in the positions of both A and the Judge. A speaks
eloquently about the value of focusing solely on personal pleasure, but in
doing so he is actually instructing the reader in how the reader might
experience more aesthetic pleasure. A’s apparent concern for the good of the
reader is, though focused on the aesthetic, still an ethical concern, despite
the fact that A makes it clear that the aesthete focuses on his or her own
pleasure and not the pleasure of others. On the other hand, the Judge, in
making the case for the ethical life, continually comes back to the point that
the ethical life leads to even more aesthetic enjoyment than the purely
aesthetic life.In the end, A and the Judge are concerned with both
aesthetic pleasures and ethical duties. Some think that Either/Or is about
overcoming the aesthetic life for the ethical life. However, the Judge’s
arguments don’t actually prove that the ethical life is wholly separate and
better than the aesthetic life. There isn’t actually an either/or choice
between the aesthetic and the ethical: both are necessary. The either/or choice
hinted at by the title Either/Or is actually a choice between the
aesthetic/ethical life and the religious life. Either you choose the aesthetic
and the ethical life or you choose the religious life. Aesthetics and ethics can
coexist, but both detract from the religious. This is why Either/Or ends with
the sermon on how, in relation to God, people are always wrong. Both A and the
Judge make cases for how people should act in accordance with aesthetic and
ethical systems, but any system designed by a human is necessarily flawed.
Kierkegaard does not explore the religious very deeply in Either/Or, saving
that for his later works, but Either/Or demonstrates that neither the aesthetic
life nor the ethical life is complete without religion. A’s groundless
individuality and the Judge’s principled marriage both interfere with the
intense, faith-based introspection that exemplifies the religious life.The final sermon in Either/Or is partially an attack on
Hegel, who believes that the divine is played out through the actions of
society. Kierkegaard emphatically does not believe this to be the case. If the
divine is played out through society, then the social, ethical life would be,
as a manifestation of the divine, the best life. Kierkegaard argues that only
God is in the right and to approach God requires introspective faith. There is
no system, aesthetic or ethical, that can truly lead people in the right
direction: people need religion, but they need it on a personal level, not a societal
level. Kierkegaard feels that beliefs like Hegel’s, and institutions like the
church, claim to provide answers to people’s troubles but in reality are simply
providing excuses to avoid self-examination. Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms in
Either/Or can be viewed as a concrete metaphor for Kierkegaard’s internal
confusion. In other words, although Kierkegaard wrote all of Either/Or, he made
up authors for different parts to represent different aspects of his own
personality. The conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical exists, to a
certain extent, in every human. There are many systems in place to help mediate
this conflict, but Kierkegaard demonstrates in Either/Or that the only escape
from this conflict is to take a personal approach to religion. Fear and Trembling SummaryFear and Trembling centers on the biblical story of Abraham.
Abraham, childless after 80 years, prays for a son. God grants his wish, and
Abraham has Isaac. Thirty years later, God orders Abraham to kill his son.
Abraham prepares to kill Isaac, but at the last second God spares Isaac and
allows Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead. Fear and Trembling includes four
different retellings of the story, each with a slightly different viewpoint. In
the first version, Abraham decides to kill Isaac in accordance with God’s will.
Abraham convinces Isaac that he’s doing it by his own will, not by God’s. This
is a lie, but Abraham says to himself that he would rather have Isaac lose
faith in his father than lose faith in God. In the second version, Abraham
sacrifices a ram instead of Isaac. Even though God spares Isaac, Abraham’s
faith is shaken because God asked him to kill Isaac in the first place. In the
third version, Abraham decides not to kill Isaac and then prays to God to
forgive him for having thought of sacrificing his son in the first place. In
the fourth version, Abraham can’t go through with killing Isaac. Isaac begins
to question his own faith due to Abraham’s refusal to do what God commanded.In the rest of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard examines his
four retellings of the story of Abraham, focusing on the religious and the
ethical. Kierkegaard claims that the killing of Isaac is ethically wrong but
religiously right. Kierkegaard also uses his retelling of the Abraham story to
distinguish between faith and resignation. Abraham could have been resigned to
kill Isaac just because God told him to do so and because he knew that God was
always right. However, Kierkegaard claims that Abraham did not act out of a
resignation that God must always be obeyed but rather out of faith that God
would not do something that was ethically wrong. Abraham knew that killing
Isaac was ethically wrong, but he had faith that God would spare his son.
Abraham decided to do something ethically wrong because having faith in God’s
good will was religiously right. Kierkegaard claims that the tension between
ethics and religion causes Abraham anxiety.Kierkegaard argues that his retellings of the story of
Abraham demonstrate the importance of a “teleological suspension of the
ethical.” Teleological means “in regard to the end.” If you are hungry and you
eat something with the goal of no longer being hungry, then you made a
teleological decision: you acted, by eating, so as to achieve the end of no
longer being hungry. Abraham performs a teleological suspension of the ethical
when he decides to kill Isaac. Abraham knows that killing Isaac is unethical.
However, Abraham decides to suspend the ethical—in other words, to put ethical
concerns on the back burner—because he has faith in the righteousness of the
end (or telos) that God will bring about. Abraham’s faith that God will not
allow an unethical telos allows him to make what seems to be an unethical
decision. Abraham puts religious concerns over ethical concerns, thus proving
his faith in God.AnalysisFear and Trembling details the relationship between the
ethical and the religious in much the same way that Either/Or details the
relationship between the aesthetic and ethical. In Either/Or, the aesthetic and
the ethical are not entirely opposed. In Fear and Trembling, the ethical and
the religious are not directly opposed either. However, the tension between
ethics and religion produces anxiety. Abraham feels anxiety because it is his
ethical duty to spare Isaac and his religious duty to sacrifice Isaac. Ethics
are for the good of the many, and they transcend an individual’s personal
aesthetic concerns, but Abraham recognizes that his personal relationship to
God transcends his social commitment to ethics. If Abraham had desired to kill
Isaac, this would have been both immoral and irreligious. However, Abraham
doesn’t decide to kill Isaac for personal aesthetic reasons or for social
ethical reasons. Abraham decides to kill Isaac because of Abraham’s personal
faith that God will not actually allow Isaac to die.Kierkegaard believes ethics are important to society but
that only an individual can approach God, and an individual can only approach
God through faith. Kierkegaard argues that Abraham’s faith in God was a faith
that God wouldn’t really make Abraham kill Isaac. If Abraham had not had enough
faith, he would have refused to kill his son. Abraham’s faith allowed a
teleological suspension of the ethical. Kierkegaard uses this story to
illustrate strong faith. Abraham’s faith was tested by God, and Abraham passed
the test. In this way Kierkegaard attempts to draw a distinction between the
blind obedience required by the church and the true faith of the individual.
Kierkegaard would argue that if Abraham had only been willing to kill Isaac
because God ordered him to do so, this would have demonstrated obedience, not
faith. Instead, the Abraham of Kierkegaard’s retelling is willing to kill Isaac
because of his faith that God won’t actually make him kill Isaac. This sounds
like a paradox, or an inherently contradictory situation. However, the seeming
paradox highlights the distinction between faith and belief. Abraham has faith
that God won’t make him kill Isaac, but that doesn’t mean he believes it. To
believe something is to be assured of it; to have faith requires the
possibility that you will be proven wrong. If Abraham genuinely believed that
God wouldn’t make him kill Isaac, the sacrifice would be no kind of test.
However, Abraham cannot be fully assured that his son will be spared. He must
have faith that Isaac will not die, even though he believes that he must kill
him.Kierkegaard illustrates one of the essential paradoxes, or
seeming impossibilities, of ethics. An ethical system consists of rules that
are established to promote the welfare of large groups of people. However,
sometimes the rules actually harm people, and following a rule may help one
person but harm ten. Ethical systems are created to achieve certain ends, but
humans lack the ability to see into the future. Therefore, no one can be
completely certain of how to reach these desired ends. Faith in God answers
this uncertainty because it removes the burden of prediction. Faith involves
the teleological suspension of the ethical, in which faith allows one to
believe that an unethical action will actually result in a better end. Humans
alone have no access to this kind of information, only God does. Therefore,
humans must put their trust in God whenever doing so conflicts with society’s
ethical systems. The decision to do this produces anxiety because a person can
never know if he or she has passed the test until the test is complete.
Kierkegaard thinks anxiety is a negative feeling, yet it can be taken as a
positive sign that one is pursuing the correct relationship with God. The Sickness Unto Death SummaryKierkegaard wrote The Sickness Unto Death under the
pseudonym “Anti-Climacus,” the same pseudonym under which he wrote his two most
important religious works, The Sickness Unto Death and Practices in
Christianity. The “sickness” in the title is despair: despair is the sickness
that everyone has until they die. Anti-Climacus defines despair primarily as a
sickness of the self. He also says that everyone, whether they know it or not,
is in despair. The most basic form of despair stems from not knowing you are in
despair. A slightly more advanced form comes from a desire not to exist, and
the most complex form of despair manifests in an attempt to escape the despair
of not wanting to exist. All of these varieties of despair are caused by a
tension between the infinite and the finite: Anti-Climacus claims that,
although you will die and are thus finite, you also have an eternal self, which
is infinite. After defining despair, Anti-Climacus questions whether it is a
good or a bad thing. He comes to the conclusion that it is both. Despair is a
type of suffering, so it must be bad. However, despair is a direct result of
self-awareness, and increased self-awareness actually makes the self stronger.
The stronger one’s self, the closer one is to God. Anti-Climacus claims that
only a “true Christian” can manage to live without despair. A true Christian is
someone who places total faith in his or her relationship with God.Anti-Climacus says that despair is sin, and the only way to
escape sin is to put complete faith in God. However, putting faith in God
involves an increase of self-awareness and thus an increase in despair. We are
thus faced with the prospect that the closer to God one grows, the greater
one’s despair and the greater one’s sin. Only by growing infinitely close to
God can despair finally be defeated. The concrete sins, such as murder and
stealing, arise from the sin of despair. However, to despair is the worst sin
of all. This sounds like a tautology—a circular line of reasoning—but it is
not. Anti-Climacus does not think of sin as something you do but rather as
something you are. All the bad things a sinner does (stealing, killing,
cheating) are not sins themselves: they are the results of being in sin. To
despair over being in sin—in other words, to despair over being in
despair—merely intensifies one’s sin. The worst sin of all is to refuse
forgiveness for one’s sin: the only way to escape sin is to approach God with
faith that forgiveness will be offered. Of course, approaching God in the first
place intensifies sin. This is part of the paradox of faith.AnalysisMuch of The Sickness Unto Death hangs on Kierkegaard’s
definition of “a self.” Kierkegaard doesn’t use the term the way you or I might
in an everyday conversation. Kierkegaard’s self is not just synonymous with
person. A self is, for Kierkegaard, a set of relations. On the simplest level,
a self is a set of relations between a person and the world around him or her.
A body and a brain constitute a person, but more is required for a self. The
self is defined by external and internal relations. While the idea of relating
to oneself may sound contradictory, it isn’t really. “A self relating to
oneself” is just another way of describing self-awareness. Think of a person
trying to decide whether to go running or watch TV. This is an internal
conflict, and a conflict is, in essence, a relation. Different aspects of your
personality are conflicting, but the conflict itself is part of what makes up
the self. The will is synonymous with the self. The will binds together all of
one’s different aspects into a coherent whole. However, for Kierkegaard, the
inability to make a choice is as much a part of one’s self as the ability to
make a choice. The self is the will—or, possibly, the lack of will. The highest
and most important level of relation is not between the self and others, or the
self and itself, but between the self and God.Everyone has a self, whether they realize it or not, and
having a self causes despair. Kierkegaard’s notion of despair is not synonymous
with unhappiness. One can be in despair and not even know it. Despair doesn’t
affect a person, it affects a self. Kierkegaard’s self is similar to the common
concept of the soul. Depression and unhappiness affect a person, but despair
affects the self because despair is a spiritual sickness. Nonspiritual
people—that is, people who don’t know they have a self—suffer this sickness
even though they aren’t aware of it, because being unaware of one’s self is the
most basic form of despair. People who despair at not having a self are more
aware of their spiritual aspect—as they at least recognize the possibility of
having a self—but because they incorrectly believe they don’t possess a self,
they too suffer despair. Despairing at not having a self is like worrying that
one doesn’t have a coherent identity. The third kind of despair, despair at
being a self, exists in someone who realizes that his or her identity is no
greater than his or her relations, specifically his or her relationship to God.
The closer one comes to realizing that one’s self is actually just one’s
relation to God, the closer one comes to escaping despair.